Indonesia’s Puppeteering Culture
It’s fading away.
Sujiwo Tejo — a professional puppeteer, has been seen as one of The Three Musketeers on attacking government’s decisions and policies along side Rocky Gerung and Haris Azhar. Especially as the President has a nickname that fits him perfectly — a “Puppet”.
The President has always been overshadowed by his minister with the name of Luhut Pandjahitan —giving him the nickname of ‘Minister with the flavor of President’ or as ‘The Real President’.
With the culture of puppeteering has been going up in a bubble since the start of 2014 election, this current crisis might just be the catalyst that will pop the bubble and pull everything down while a new political power might be eager to replace the current one.
If analysts are confused as to where to narrow down the cause of Indonesia’s change of diplomacy style from the open and democratic era of the former president — Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to the current bleak and authoritarian style of governance and the muted and closeted diplomacy which has closed its door to other democratic countries and has gotten itself closer to authoritarian and straight up dictatorial countries, while steadily cutting ties with the free country of Taiwan.
Then analysts should look no further than to focus on Luhut Pandjahitan and the head of the biggest political party in Indonesia, Megawati.
As the head of PDI-P, Megawati had just given her congratulations to the CCP for their 100th anniversary on the name of Indonesians, without the permission from the Indonesians themselves, which has a horrifying history with communism.
Not only that Indonesians are allergic to communism, we are also condemning China’s enslavement of Uyghurs, knowing all these, Megawati still went ahead with congratulating CCP’s 100th anniversary, which caused tremendous public outrage.
How about all these diplomatic pivot from openness to China-centric both politically and economically by Indonesia? On that regard we can divert our eyes to Luhut as the center of these changes.
Whenever criticisms and well-justified hostility toward China-centric policies as well as the importation of Chinese workers amid the pandemic and economic crisis, as these Chinese workers cost more than local Indonesian workers, the excuse of cheap Chinese labors — is no longer an option.
For those who are familiar with China’s domestic societal predicament of having more than one billion number of population, with an unbalanced gender ratio of mostly single males — which was caused by the CCP’s one-child policy, is that joblessness for male population can lead to distress, which can lead to protest, which can then lead to more problems for the CCP.
This is the reason why CCP is sending their single-male population overseas whether that be to continental Africa or in this case, to Indonesia. Even if it doesn’t make economical sense for the target countries.
So why would target countries take the offer? For the people of Indonesia, most do not want any more workers from China, as they themselves are without jobs. So why give these jobs to the Chinese?
At first — the official reasoning behind this policy is that these Chinese workers are experts, trained, and certificated. But from what many (journalists, representatives, local bureaucrats, etc) have found in the field, is that these Chinese workers couldn’t speak a single word of English, not even the two common words of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
